


the dark of the night

by softkaz



Series: at night, henrietta felt like magic [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Insomnia, M/M, Talking On The Phone, idk but it's soft and cute so, uhm??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:39:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6229504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softkaz/pseuds/softkaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gansey can't fall alseep. Adam has a nightmare.<br/>There is something incredibly intimate about the dark and hushed telephone calls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the dark of the night

**Author's Note:**

> so this is the first part of a series i kinda wanna make abt the gangsey and the night and not being able to sleep. they'll be short lil fics, probably. we'll see. anyway. adansey owns my ass. i hope u enjoy this.

Despite the fact that he never slept, Gansey actually liked the night. 

He enjoyed the stillness of it, enjoyed the small, faint winking of a light lost somewhere in the dark shape of Henrietta below his window, a street lamp or maybe the bedside lamp of a fellow insomniac. There was a particular shape of the silence at night, too, a particular weight and taste and color, and Gansey liked to sit on his floor and pick at it, reshape it, let it devour him completely. It did trouble him, however, how big everything seemed at night. Or rather, how small. It made him feel disproportionate and a little helpless, but he had learnt to deal with both feelings so that, at night, he never really felt anything at all. 

* * *

 

That night, like many others, he was sitting on the floor, his back to the bed, a forgotten tube of glue in his hand. He was especially tired, however, so much so that he didn’t even feel like working on his model of Henrietta. The empty streets and the houses with their unfinished roofs seemed to stare at him, and he felt the strange sensation of being hopelessly alone. 

He leaned his head against his bed and took off his glasses to rub at his eyes. His head felt clouded and heavy. 

Suddenly, his phone rang. 

Gansey stopped. He let it ring for a moment, his eyes closed and his body still. 

He glanced at the old, tacky, orange clock on his bedside table. It was very, very late.

He had just talked to Malory the day before, so it seemed unlikely the old man would want to talk to him again in such a short time. He usually needed to take at least four-day breaks between his phone calls.

No one else called him this late at night.

His heart was doing complicated jumps in his chest.

_Is it Adam is he okay Ronan is home, isn’t he, what happened what happened what happened-_

He took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and reached for his phone. He didn’t look at the screen when he pressed answer.

“Hello?” 

A breathless, “Gansey?”

He held his breath. “Adam? Hi. Is everything alright?”

Again, “Gansey.” 

Something about Adam’s voice was off; he sounded distant and hollowed-out. He sounded like he did when he used to come to school with a bruise under him shirt. 

Gansey was already on his feet. “I’m coming over, okay? I’ll be there-”

He heard Adam’s effort at steadying his voice as he said, “No. Wait. It’s okay. You don’t- I’m sorry. Did I wake you up?”

He laughed, a short exhale of a breath. “No. That’s okay. I wasn’t sleeping.” 

“Oh. Okay.”

Gansey waited for a moment to see if Adam would say anything, but he didn’t, so he said, slowly, “What’s wrong?”

There was a long sigh, and then, “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Adam. It’s three am.”

Silence. Finally, “I had a nightmare. I didn’t know who else to call.”

Gansey took a leaf mint out of his pocket and chewed on it silently. He imagined Adam as he probably was, sitting on the edge of his bed, driven awake by terrors bigger than him. Even though he was only a couple-minute drive from Monmouth, he seemed incredibly far away. 

“I’m coming over,” he said, again.

“No, I’ve got work early tomorrow morning. There’s no point.” He paused. “But could you- could you stay on the phone with me?”

Gansey almost laughed at the question. “Yes, Parrish. Of course I will.” He settled down on the floor again, mint leaf still in his hand. Really, he wanted to grab his keys and be at St. Agnes in half an instant, wanted to sit beside Adam on his bed. But he knew better. He was more than aware that this was not about him. This was Adam Parrish, surviving. It was not his business to save him. Adam Parrish did not need to be saved. 

His voice careful, he said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Adam was silent for a long moment, and the silence felt tangible. Gansey thought, distantly, how glad he was that the free calls on the card for the phone had been cheap enough for Adam to agree to buy. 

Finally, Adam spoke again, and Gansey was relieved to hear that the tension had mostly seeped out of his voice. He just sounded tired. Very, very tired. The line crackled a little when he released a breath. “I dreamt of him. He came here, and he said- I was scared, Gansey. I woke up and I kept my eyes closed, waiting for his voice to have followed me to reality. I thought- I thought I would feel him hit me again.”

“But you will never feel that again. Your father is not there.”

“He’s not here,” Adam agreed, hesitantly, his voice very far away. Gansey’s heart ached. 

Gansey waited another moment, sorting through things to say. He thought about his own nightmares, how scary that first moment it was when he was awake but afraid to open his eyes. Afraid that maybe the buzzing was real and there was a wasp in his chest instead of a heart.

They were silent for a very long time. Still, there was something incredibly intimate about the sound of Adam’s breath over the phone, more so because of the darkness and also because it was Adam.

Finally, he said, “Sometimes it helps me fall back asleep if I listen to music. You have that old player Blue dragged to your apartment, don’t you? You could listen to something. It might help.”

“I don’t really want to fall back asleep,” Adam said, but his voice was soft and tired and Gansey mused he was half-asleep already, now that he had talked about it, now that the danger had been analysed.

Gansey felt strangely proud. Adam Parrish did not need to be saved. 

“Then what _do_ you want?”

“Dunno. Talk to me about something. Glendower? Oh, no. Wait. Please don’t. I don’t know. What are you doing now?”

Gansey let a small, lazy smile spread across his face. He could picture Adam’s lashes turning silver in the barely-there light of the same moon that stared back at him. “I’m sitting on the floor. Talking to you. Trying not to wake Ronan up.”

“Mhmm.”

“Yeah. Also. I added three new houses to my Henrietta model. I’m almost up to St. Agnes.” 

“You’ll have to make a tiny cardboard model of me,” Adam said, but the sentence blurred into one very long word because of his fatigue.

Gansey laughed silently. “Yeah. I’ll make you so that you’re on your bed, sleeping, and in this version of Henrietta you will have no nightmares.”

Adam made his sleepy version of a laugh, and Gansey’s heart stuttered with a kind of slow, lazy happiness that knew how to take its time. Gansey was struck with a fierce, overwhelming longing that, hard as he tried, could not shape into anything that he knew how to voice. 

“I’d like that,” Adam said. “I’d like to live in your version of Henrietta.”

He was _so tired_. Gansey could feel it. He should hang up, he knew, but he also knew that he should not. What they had here, what they held gently between the telephone lines, was very fragile and Gansey was afraid it would break. 

So instead he kept talking. “Yeah. No nightmares here. We find Glendower. The Pig never breaks down. Less homework from school.” He waned to add, _You are not so far away_ , but he did not. 

Adam made a noise of approval. Gansey kept talking. “The sky is always blue. Finals are cancelled. Noah stops putting glitter on everything.” He wanted to say, _You start seeing yourself the way I see you. Ronan stops drinking. Things finally start make sense_ , but he did not.

He waited for a moment, and then another, and the silence had shifted in a way that let him know that Adam had fallen asleep. His breathing was barely audible now, steady. Gansey felt his shoulders relax. “Goodnight, Adam,” he whispered softly, then hung up the phone.

His smile lingered as he finally pushed himself up and climbed back into bed. He didn’t think he would be able to fall alseep, but he owed it to Adam to try. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!!! i hope u enjoyed it !! ~ hit me up on tumblr @softkaz


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